How to Export iCloud Photos to an External Hard Drive

If your iCloud Photo Library contains thousands of photos and you want a local backup on an external hard drive, Photo Export makes it simple. This guide walks you through the process.

What you need

• A Mac running macOS 15.0 or later
• iCloud Photos enabled on your Mac — go to System Settings → Apple Account → iCloud → Photos and make sure it’s on. Photo Export reads your local Photos library through Apple’s PhotoKit framework (the same API the built-in Photos app uses), so your iCloud photos need to be syncing to this Mac.
• An external hard drive, USB drive, or any local folder
• The Photo Export app — on the Mac App Store, or free on GitHub

Step 1: Download and install Photo Export

Mac App Store — Install directly from the App Store for automatic updates. Your purchase supports ongoing development.

GitHub Releases (free):

1. Download the latest .dmg from the GitHub Releases page.
2. Open the DMG and drag Photo Export to your Applications folder.
3. Launch the app. It is signed and notarized by Apple, so it will open without Gatekeeper warnings.

Step 2: Grant Photos library access

When you first open Photo Export, macOS will ask you to grant access to your Photos library. Click Allow to continue. This lets the app read your iCloud and Apple Photos library.

Step 3: Choose your export destination

Click Choose Folder and select your external hard drive or any local folder. The app remembers your choice, so you only need to do this once.

Step 4: Browse and export

Browse your library two ways via the Timeline / Collections segmented control above the sidebar:

• Timeline — your library by year and month. Click a month to preview its thumbnails and full-size photos.
• Collections — your Favorites, every album and folder you’ve created in Photos, and any iCloud shared albums you participate in. Click an album to preview its contents. Shared albums sit in their own sidebar section because they export at reduced quality — see Shared albums (reduced fidelity). (Smart albums other than Favorites aren’t included.)

Once you’ve picked a scope, decide what to write. Open Settings → Advanced (Cmd+, or the toolbar’s Settings cog) for three toggles:

• Include originals for edited photos — off (default) exports one file per photo, in the version Photos shows. Edited photos write the edit; unedited photos write the original. On adds a _orig companion (e.g. IMG_0001_orig.HEIC) for any photo with edits in Photos so you keep a copy of the original bytes.
• Convert HEIC to JPEG — off (default) preserves HEIC and HEIF captures in their original format. On re-encodes HEIC captures as high-quality JPEG on export — useful if your destination (a NAS, a Windows PC, an older photo viewer) doesn’t understand HEIC. Non-HEIC photos are unaffected. Applies to new exports — re-run an Export action to convert HEICs already on disk.
• Separate videos into a subfolder — off (default) keeps photos and videos in the same month or album folder. On routes standalone videos into a videos/ subfolder (e.g. 2026/03/videos/IMG_0002.MOV) so a backup doesn’t mix .JPG and .MOV files together. The paired video of a Live Photo stays next to its still. Applies to new exports — videos already on disk stay where they are; turning this on later produces a mixed layout until you re-export the affected months.

Then export:

• Timeline: navigate to a month and click Export Month, or click Export All in the toolbar to queue the whole library.
• Collections: select Favorites or any album and click Export Favorites / Export Album, or click Export All Albums in the toolbar to queue every user album in one go (Favorites is excluded — it has its own button).

The app organizes the output on disk:

• Timeline exports land in a Year/Month/ folder structure (e.g. 2025/06/IMG_0001.JPG).
• Favorites land in Collections/Favorites/.
• Albums land in Collections/Albums/<Album>/. Albums under Photos folders preserve their hierarchy (e.g. Collections/Albums/Trips/Iceland/).

If any photos are stored only in iCloud, the app automatically downloads the originals during export. Unedited photos never produce a _orig companion — there is nothing to pair with.

Live Photos export as still-only by default. Turn on Settings → Advanced → Export Live Photos as paired image + video to also write the paired video next to the still (e.g. IMG_0001.HEIC alongside IMG_0001.MOV) using whatever extension casing PhotoKit reports for that resource — typically .MOV on Apple hardware. With Include originals on, the _orig companions are also paired (e.g. IMG_0001_orig.HEIC + IMG_0001_orig.MOV). The paired video is typically 1–3 MB per Live Photo — libraries with thousands of them roughly double in size on disk when the toggle is on. Shared-album Live Photos stay still-only regardless of the setting because Apple doesn’t expose the paired video for assets that live only in a shared album.

Edited videos render on your Mac during export, which is slower than copying — expect 4K iCloud videos to take noticeably longer per file than a plain copy would. Plain copies remain fast.

Resuming an interrupted export

If the export is interrupted — you unplug the drive, close the app, or your Mac goes to sleep — you can resume and the app will skip most already-exported files. In rare cases (e.g. a crash mid-write), a file may be copied again, but no data is lost.

Rebuilding state from an existing backup

If you reinstall the app, switch builds, or restore your data on a new Mac, File → Import Existing Backup… rebuilds local export state from disk. It scans the destination, matches files to your Photos library, and adopts what’s already there as exported. As part of the same step, it prunes records for files that are no longer on disk — for example if you deleted a folder, recreated it empty under the same name, or removed individual exports. The result always reflects the current contents of the destination.

If an export gets stuck

If the progress fraction stops climbing or you suspect specific photos are failing, use Help → Save Diagnostic Report…. The app writes a plain-text file listing every photo whose export is in failed or in-progress state, along with the underlying error message (e.g. iCloud download failure, disk full). If a previous Auto Export run was interrupted by the operating system (rare, but possible on very large libraries), the report also names which scope was in flight at the time of the interruption. Attach the file to a GitHub issue so the actual failure cause is visible — it is otherwise only in the macOS unified log under the com.valtteriluoma.photo-export subsystem.

When Photos can’t provide the edited version of an asset (Edited resource unavailable in the report), the app falls back to writing the original instead, with a _orig suffix on the filename — for example IMG_4019_orig.MOV. Once the original has been written, the asset is considered exported and won’t be retried on future runs — the original is your backup. The diagnostic report flags these assets so you can see which ones used the original instead of the edit.

Why use Photo Export instead of manually dragging photos?

• Organized folders: Photos are automatically sorted into Year/Month/ folders instead of dumped into one giant directory.
• Tracks what’s exported: The app remembers what’s been exported. Run it again and it skips already-exported photos.
• Pause and resume: Long exports can be paused and picked up later.
• Open source: No subscription, no account, no ads. MIT licensed. Free on GitHub, or support the project on the Mac App Store.